He Went And Got A People For His Name

The list is the back of an envelope, and it has been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases have gone soft and one corner has torn clean away.

Nine entries on it, in small careful handwriting. A hall behind a hardware store, with the time of a Thursday meeting that turned out to have stopped the previous spring. A house group whose address had a street and no number, so he drove the length of it twice and came home. A place three towns over where a man shook his hand at the door for a long time and then asked whether he had moved to the area for work, and he said no, and neither of them could think of the next thing to say. Two years of that. Nine lines.

He keeps the envelope in the fold of his wallet. Every few weeks he flattens it on the kitchen table with the side of his thumb and reads it the way a man rereads a letter he has already answered, checking for something he might have missed.

Now here is the thing about that list, which is your list, in whatever pocket you have kept it in. You have been reading it as a record of nine failures. Not once have you read it as a record of two years of being pulled toward something. And nobody has ever put to you the obvious question about it, which is this. Who has been doing the looking?

Somebody was doing the looking

There is a room in the book of Acts where this exact question gets settled, and it gets settled in one sentence.

The room is full of men arguing. Not badly, but seriously, about the largest thing they had ever had to work out: what God was doing with people who had grown up nowhere near the covenant, who did not know the feasts, whose grandparents had prayed to something else entirely. Peter speaks. Paul and Barnabas give their report. Then James stands up to sum up the whole matter, and what he says is short enough to fit on the back of that envelope.

Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name.Acts 15:14

Read it a second time for the verbs, because the verbs are the entire thing. God visited. God took. God did it for His name. There is not one verb in that sentence belonging to the people who ended up gathered. They are the object of every action in the account of their own gathering and the subject of none of them.

And that word visit is not a drawing room word. In the Greek of the New Testament it is what you do when you go out to see about somebody who is sick. You leave where you are, you go to where they are, you look them over, and you do something about what you find. It is an errand word. There is a departure inside it.

You are one of the people God went out and got, and the going out was finished long before you ever started keeping a list. Acts 15:14 puts His visiting and His taking in the plainest past tense the sentence will hold, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carried that errand the whole way to your kitchen table.

Now set that against two years of driving. You have been conducting a search. What Scripture is describing is a collection. Those are not two versions of one activity. In a search, the finding rests on the searcher, and every dark window and every wrong street is a mark against him. In a collection, the finding was done by the one who came out, and the person collected contributes nothing to it whatever except being where he already was.

You have a place among God's people that no meeting created, and no meeting you could not find has withheld it from you. It is written that He took out of them a people, and the Spirit who did the taking is not waiting on a hall behind a hardware store to countersign the work.

For his name, which is why it holds

Then there is the last phrase, and it is carrying more than it looks.

A people for his name. That is the purpose clause of the whole sentence, and a purpose clause tells you what a thing exists for, which tells you in turn what keeps it in existence.

Suppose the people of God existed for the comfort of its members. Then it would be held together by the members, maintained by their capacity to turn up, and a man who cannot reach anybody would have a thinning share in it and eventually no share at all. That is not a cruel idea. It is simply what would follow. A standing sustained by attendance is canceled by absence, and every year of quiet would take another piece of it.

That is not what the verse says. It says a people for his name. This gathering exists for the honor of the God who came out and got it, and it is maintained by His interest in His own name, and His interest in His own name has never flagged once in the entire history of the world.

I am not going to tell you the two years were a lesson. I do not believe they were, and I would not say it to you if I did. The ache of walking into a room where nobody knows what you are talking about is real, and so is the drive home afterward. What I can tell you is what those two years were not. They were not an audition. They were not a qualifying round. No verdict about your standing among the people of God was handed down in any of those halls, because no verdict about it is being taken anywhere.

You were taken out for His name, and a people that God holds together for the honor of His own name is not a people a man falls out of by being unable to reach one. He put that in writing at Acts 15:14, and the same Spirit who moved the errand from end to end is the one keeping you inside its result tonight.

Right now, as you read this, you are one of them, on ground that was laid before you were born and has never once been reviewed since. Scripture states it and does not soften it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a written sentence into something standing upright inside a man.